Book to Screen: Eileen – Of desperation, deviance and deception
Eileen, the film for which author Ottessa Moshfegh co-wrote the screenplay based on her novel, is as uncomfortable in its skin as the title character is in her own
There are two types of people in the world, a father tells his daughter. “Some people, they’re the real people. Like in a movie, they’re the ones you watch, they’re the ones making moves. And other people, they’re just there, filling the space. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.” It isn’t the first time Eileen (Thomasin McKenzie) has had to listen to her nasty drunk of a dad (Shea Whigham) tear her down. At 24, she has stomached enough of his bile, his passing remarks, his scornful reminders that she isn’t half the woman her sister is and their mother was. Putting up with his emotional abuse is just part of the daily routine in Eileen’s unremarkable life. She took care of her ailing mother until her death. Now, she begrudgingly takes care of her bereaved father, going on gin runs to keep him pacified and out of trouble.
It is the mid-1960s. Eileen, the jaded wallflower for whom the Ottessa Moshfegh novel and the William Oldroyd film is named, is a young woman living in a wintry Massachusetts town. By day, she works as a secretary at a juvenile correctional facility. By night, she sleeps in the drafty attic of a squalid house to steer clear of her sometimes-gropey dad. Between home and work, Eileen spends her days like an extra making up the numbers in the background, “languishing in the agony of not being beautiful.” Hers is a life lived on the cusp of other people’s lives. We first meet Eileen in the film sitting in a car parked by the beach, spying on a couple making out in a nearby vehicle. Aroused, she opens the car door, scoops up a handful of snow stained possibly by her own piss, and stuffs it down her tweed skirt. Loneliness, resentment and the desire to escape stoke graphic fantasies of patricide and suicide. A week before Christmas 1964, Eileen gets an early present — a chance for self-reinvention — with the arrival of Rebecca (Anne Hathaway), a co-worker who is everything Eileen isn’t (read: attractive, confident, sophisticated). As the two women grow closer, their friendship emboldens Eileen to transform herself from a space-filler to a move-maker. When she does make her move, it is the vacant front she puts on as a disguise (what she describes as a “death mask” in the book) that will help her get away with murder.
“I looked so boring, lifeless, immune and unaffected,” narrates an older Eileen looking back on her escape, “but in truth I was always furious, seething, my thoughts racing, my mind like a killer’s.” A visceral pulse can be felt beneath her words. The shoplifting habit, the laxative dependency, the porn mag perusal, the drinking, the impalement fantasies of icicles hanging above the front door, and all the deathly dwelling signal a dark song of stifled anguish. With Eileen, Moshfegh created a majestically self-loathing, painfully bored, quietly horny character who captivated and rattled readers in equal measure. Her singular register as a writer came through particularly in the more barbed passages about Eileen’s grotesque preoccupation with the functions and failings of her body. So ashamed of her desires and so disgusted by her sexuality is Eileen that she maintains poor hygiene and induces diarrhoea — part of her ritual self-harm to conserve her precarious equilibrium. (Even her car looks worse for wear. Smoke from the faulty exhaust funnels into the cabin if the windows aren’t rolled down.) The outer workings of Eileen’s body help Moshfegh interrogate the inner distress of her mind more pointedly. The gnarly descriptions accentuate the profound ways in which women can be marked by and alienated from a society that expects them to always conform, always accommodate, always repress their desires.
Through Eileen’s narration in the book, we get a glimpse into her interiority, a map of the pains, frustrations and resentments that shaped her life. The fixation on her foil Rebecca opens new backroads into her psyche. Eileen is a young woman immobilised by emotional neglect. While the world around her goes through revolutionary changes in the 1960s, she remains suspended between girlhood and womanhood. Unable to overcome the developmental deficits in a suffocating town, she indulges in unhealthy coping mechanisms. Years later, as a much older Eileen recounts the week preceding her disappearance, she can’t even bear to name the town she was so desperate to escape. X-ville, she calls it, disguising it in anonymity to distance herself from a painful past. The story she recounts is dressed in the visual language of suburban noir, a feature the film rendered in luscious colours and decked out in fog and shadows, cigarette smoke and mirrors. The noir elements are bound by mood rather than tradition. Rebecca is not the archetypal femme fatale just as Eileen isn’t the archetypal femme fragile. Instead of luring Eileen to her doom, Rebecca unconsciously opens the door to her liberation, her journey towards independence.
“In a week I would run away from home and never go back,” Eileen tells us at the end of the first chapter. So, we know a crossroads moment is on the horizon. The mystery concerns the path leading up to it, as retraced by our guide who may not be entirely reliable. Oldroyd’s film, for which Moshfegh and her husband Luke Goebel co-wrote the screenplay, rightly does away with Eileen’s narration. But in doing so, the viewer can’t secure a foothold in her interiority. Not when the images and sounds don’t so much embody her emotions as signify them. Not when fantasies of her pulling the trigger on her dad or on herself provide the only peeks into her troubled mind. Not with a performer who fails to inhabit her fully. Starting with her breakout role in Leave No Trace, McKenzie has played one mousy conflicted character after another, nailing the enraptured timidity and inner strength of each. Only here she is miscast. The qualities, collated in her more promising roles so far, are separated into stiff, plain, lifeless strands, obscuring the gradual transformation of her character. McKenzie just can’t seem to locate the venom fuelling Eileen’s desperation, her deviance, her deception.
On the other hand, Hathaway makes her entry as Rebecca like the straw that stirs the drink. Fresh out of Harvard, Rebecca has been hired as the new psychologist at the juvenile prison. When she arrives in her red car with her coiffed blonde bob and checkered coat, it looks like she has driven straight from a Hitchcock set. Eileen falls under her spell from the moment she sees her. The same night, she picks up a smoking habit, awkwardly mimicking her new co-worker down to the way she holds her cigarette. Soon, she becomes more mindful of her personal hygiene and grooming. She bathes more often, dresses better and makes herself up. Rebecca feels like the shot in the arm Eileen has been waiting for all her life. The tiny, frigid, dingy town feels bigger, warmer, livelier in her presence. Or at least that’s how it seems to Eileen. That Rebecca holds our antiheroine and the camera rapt is a testament to the chic and poise that Hathaway brings to the role. There is a sense of affectation to her mid-Atlantic accent that suggests her sophistication may be a performance. For Eileen, the performance serves as a template for her own transformation.
A chance for a close-quarters study arises when Rebecca invites Eileen for drinks after work. Eager to please and itching for approval, Eileen pulls out all the stops: she shaves her arms and legs; she wears her mother’s best dress and fur coat; she applies a dab of rouge on her cheeks and a red lipstick to match. Once at the bar, the two bond over martinis and the case of Lee Polk (Sam Nivola), a teenager imprisoned at the detention centre for slitting his dad’s throat. Eileen doesn’t feel so invisible with Rebecca’s eyes on her. She feels most seen when Rebecca brushes off the male patrons, even elbowing one venturing to cut in, to slow dance with her. The jukebox music swirls with longing as Art Neville’s lovelorn voice sings the ballad All These Things. The air is thick with tension, not all of it romantic and sexual, though there is unmistakably both, more so in the film than in the novel. The night ends in the parking lot with a drunk Rebecca giving a drunk Eileen a hug before planting a kiss on her lips. The snow falls gently around them, a detail that teases the question if the kiss is real or if Eileen is projecting her fantasy.
There is no kiss that seals the homoerotic tension in the novel. Eileen refers to Rebecca as “my match, my kindred spirit, my ally.” She admits to an infatuation: “I felt in a way that just by knowing her, I was graduating out of my misery.” But she is careful not to describe their relationship in sexual terms even in her fantasies: “I pictured hours of rapt conversation, delicious wine, a warm fire, Rebecca saying, “You’re my best friend. I love you,” and kissing my hand the way you’d kiss the hand of an oracle or a priest. I pulled my hand out from under me, red and cramped, and kissed it reverently.” The words hint at a desire censored by the repression of the times. For two women to triumph against it and refuse the loneliness imposed upon them took a courage not all possessed. Indeed, Rebecca telling Eileen, “I live a little differently than most people,” hits different in the film. The assertion makes all but explicit the queer undertone that runs through the text.
At the same time, Eileen’s hang-ups about her body, made so squeamishly explicit in the text, is all but omitted in the film. It goes without saying episodes of intestinal dysfunction do not make for a pretty sight. Eileen of the novel remains constipated for days to enjoy the climax of a violent purge. The experience, to her, is the closest thing to sex. “I stood up to flush, dizzy and sweaty and cold, then lay down while the world seemed to revolve around me... Empty and spent and light as air, I lay at rest, silent, flying in circles, my heart dancing, my mind blank.” Chronic constipation is as much a state of mind as a state of body. Years of internalising society’s damaging body ideals has limited Eileen’s self-expression. With no outlet, the disgust and anger veer inward, bottle up and act out in the pressurised theatre of her body until emerging in explosive bursts. Ritualising the suppression is her way of turning her body from a locus of pain to a locus of pleasure. Taking pleasure in the perverse is her way of rewriting desire in restrictive conditions. Embracing the grotesque is her way of reclaiming it as an intimate part of herself in and outside of herself. The film loses what Eileen rewrites, reclaims, resists to build her sense of self, what makes her Eileen, what made her such an unexampled figure on the page. The ickiest the Eileen of the film gets is when she is chewing on candies and spitting them back into the wrappers. Or when she wakes up hungover in her car the morning after her night out with Rebecca, her face glued to the frozen puke on the window.
Here’s Eileen describing the kind of girl she was at 24 in the novel: “I truly felt that the inside of my mouth was such a private area, caverns and folds of wet parting flesh, that letting anyone see into it was just as bad as spreading my legs...I kept a bottle of Listerine in my locker and swished it often, and sometimes swallowed it if I didn’t think I could get to the ladies’ room sink without having to open my mouth to speak. I didn’t want anyone to think I was susceptible to bad breath, or that there were any organic processes occurring inside my body at all. Having to breathe was an embarrassment in itself.” Eileen strongly believes she has been granted a bad deal on the social currency of good looks. But that doesn’t stop her from judging other women just as severely by the same standards. Here she is describing a mother who comes to visit her son at the juvenile prison: “She was repugnant, I thought, in her fat and dishevelment...Her lipstick was a cheap and insincere fuchsia. I stared steadily at her face, trying to determine what sort of intelligence was there. Since she was overweight, I assumed she was an idiot — I still tend to judge those types as gluttons, fools... She seemed so dowdy, so pitiful, like a sow awaiting slaughter.” The judgement is just as quick and full of assumptions the first time she sees Rebecca. “Within 30 seconds I’d decided she must be an idiot, have a brain like a powder puff, be bereft of any depth or darkness, have no interior life whatever. Like Doris Day, this woman must live in a charmed world of fluffy pillows and golden sunshine. So of course, I hated her. I’d never come face-to-face with someone so beautiful before in my life.” Beauty or lack thereof is often conflated with intelligence in her judgements. Cruelty breeds contempt. Eileen has no sympathy to spare for anyone, not even the young inmates abused by the guards. “Why should my heart ache for anyone but myself? If anyone was trapped and suffering and abused, it was me. I was the only one whose pain was real. Mine.”
On their night out, Rebecca likens Eileen to “a girl in a Dutch painting,” describing her face as “plain but fascinating” with “a beautiful turbulence.” To borrow the same analogy, if the novel is like a Vermeer portrait rich with ambiguity, the film is a counterfeit with all the rough edges sanded down. There is “a beautiful turbulence” to the book as Moshfegh catalogues the workings of a troubled mind. The film, by contrast, is plain but not fascinating. It leaves Eileen stranded without her unsavoury qualities and all the weird quirks that make her tick. It is as uncomfortable in its own skin as Eileen is in her own, a formal choice not by design but by accident.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.